Colour of Life; and other essays on things seen and heard

Thompson Meynell Alice Christiana

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pubOne.info present you this new edition. Red has been praised for its nobility as the colour of life. But the true colour of life is not red. Red is the colour of violence, or of life broken open, edited, and published. Or if red is indeed the colour of life, it is so only on condition that it is not seen. Once fully visible, red is the colour of life violated, and in the act of betrayal and of waste. Red is the secret of life, and not the manifestation thereof. It is one of the things the value of which is secrecy, one of the talents that are to be hidden in a napkin. The true colour of life is the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest colour of the unpublished blood.

Informations

• Publié par: Pub One Info
• Date de parution: 06 novembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9782819930297
• Langue: English

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THE COLOUR OF LIFE
Red has been praised for its nobility as the colourof life. But the true colour of life is not red. Red is the colourof violence, or of life broken open, edited, and published. Or ifred is indeed the colour of life, it is so only on condition thatit is not seen. Once fully visible, red is the colour of lifeviolated, and in the act of betrayal and of waste. Red is thesecret of life, and not the manifestation thereof. It is one of thethings the value of which is secrecy, one of the talents that areto be hidden in a napkin. The true colour of life is the colour ofthe body, the colour of the covered red, the implicit and notexplicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modestcolour of the unpublished blood.
So bright, so light, so soft, so mingled, the gentlecolour of life is outdone by all the colours of the world. Its verybeauty is that it is white, but less white than milk; brown, butless brown than earth; red, but less red than sunset or dawn. It islucid, but less lucid than the colour of lilies. It has the hint ofgold that is in all fine colour; but in our latitudes the hint isalmost elusive. Under Sicilian skies, indeed, it is deeper than oldivory; but under the misty blue of the English zenith, and the warmgrey of the London horizon, it is as delicately flushed as thepaler wild roses, out to their utmost, flat as stars, in the hedgesof the end of June.
For months together London does not see the colourof life in any mass. The human face does not give much of it, whatwith features, and beards, and the shadow of the top-hat and chapeau melon of man, and of the veils of woman.Besides, the colour of the face is subject to a thousand injuriesand accidents. The popular face of the Londoner has soon lost itsgold, its white, and the delicacy of its red and brown. We misslittle beauty by the fact that it is never seen freely in greatnumbers out-of-doors. You get it in some quantity when all theheads of a great indoor meeting are turned at once upon a speaker;but it is only in the open air, needless to say, that the colour oflife is in perfection, in the open air, “clothed with the sun, ”whether the sunshine be golden and direct, or dazzlingly diffusedin grey.
The little figure of the London boy it is that hasrestored to the landscape the human colour of life. He is allowedto come out of all his ignominies, and to take the late colour ofthe midsummer north-west evening, on the borders of the Serpentine.At the stroke of eight he sheds the slough of nameless colours— allallied to the hues of dust, soot, and fog, which are the coloursthe world has chosen for its boys— and he makes, in his hundreds, abright and delicate flush between the grey-blue water and thegrey-blue sky. Clothed now with the sun, he is crowned by-and-bywith twelve stars as he goes to bathe, and the reflection of anearly moon is under his feet.
So little stands between a gamin and all thedignities of Nature. They are so quickly restored. There seems tobe nothing to do, but only a little thing to undo. It is like theart of Eleonora Duse. The last and most finished action of herintellect, passion, and knowledge is, as it were, the flicking awayof some insignificant thing mistaken for art by other actors, somelittle obstacle to the way and liberty of Nature.
All the squalor is gone in a moment, kicked off withthe second boot, and the child goes shouting to complete thelandscape with the lacking colour of life. You are inclined towonder that, even undressed, he still shouts with a Cockney accent.You half expect pure vowels and elastic syllables from hisrestoration, his spring, his slenderness, his brightness, and hisglow. Old ivory and wild rose in the deepening midsummer sun, hegives his colours to his world again.
It is easy to replace man, and it will take no greattime, where Nature has lapsed, to replace Nature. It is always todo, by the happily easy way of doing nothing. The grass is alwaysready to grow in the streets— and no streets could ask for a morecharming finish than your green grass. The gasometer even must fallto pieces unless it is renewed; but the grass renews itself. Thereis nothing so remediable as the work of modern man— “a thoughtwhich is also, ” as Mr Pecksniff said, “very soothing. ” And byremediable I mean, of course, destructible. As the bathing childshuffles off his garments— they are few, and one brace sufficeshim— so the land might always, in reasonable time, shuffle off itsyellow brick and purple slate, and all the things that collectabout railway stations. A single night almost clears the air ofLondon.
But if the colour of life looks so well in therather sham scenery of Hyde Park, it looks brilliant and graveindeed on a real sea-coast. To have once seen it there should beenough to make a colourist. O memorable little picture! The sun wasgaining colour as it neared setting, and it set not over the sea,but over the land. The sea had the dark and rather stern, but notcold, blue of that aspect— the dark and not the opal tints. The skywas also deep. Everything was very definite, without mystery, andexceedingly simple. The most luminous thing was the shining whiteof an edge of foam, which did not cease to be white because it wasa little golden and a little rosy in the sunshine. It was still thewhitest thing imaginable. And the next most luminous thing was thelittle child, also invested with the sun and the colour oflife.
In the case of women, it is of the living andunpublished blood that the violent world has professed to bedelicate and ashamed. See the curious history of the politicalrights of woman under the Revolution. On the scaffold she enjoyedan ungrudged share in the fortunes of party. Political life mightbe denied her, but that seems a trifle when you consider howgenerously she was permitted political death. She was to spin andcook for her citizen in the obscurity of her living hours; but tothe hour of her death was granted a part in the largest interests,social, national, international. The blood wherewith she should,according to Robespierre, have blushed to be seen or heard in thetribune, was exposed in the public sight unsheltered by herveins.
Against this there was no modesty. Of all privacies,the last and the innermost— the privacy of death— was never allowedto put obstacles in the way of public action for a public cause.Women might be, and were, duly suppressed when, by the mouth ofOlympe de Gouges, they claimed a “right to concur in the choice ofrepresentatives for the formation of the laws”; but in her person,too, they were liberally allowed to bear political responsibilityto the Republic. Olympe de Gouges was guillotined. Robespierre thusmade her public and complete amends.
A POINT OF BIOGRAPHY
There is hardly a writer now— of the third classprobably not one— who has not something sharp and sad to say aboutthe cruelty of Nature; not one who is able to attempt May in thewoods without a modern reference to the manifold death anddestruction with which the air, the branches, the mosses are saidto be full.
But no one has paused in the course of these phrasesto take notice of the curious and conspicuous fact of thesuppression of death and of the dead throughout this landscape ofmanifest life. Where are they— all the dying, all the dead, of thepopulous woods? Where do they hide their little last hours, whereare they buried? Where is the violence concealed? Under what gaycustom and decent habit? You may see, it is true, an earth-worm ina robin’s beak, and may hear a thrush breaking a snail’s shell; butthese little things are, as it were, passed by with a kind oftwinkle for apology, as by a well-bred man who does openly somelittle solecism which is too slight for direct mention, and which ameaner man might hide or avoid. Unless you are very modern indeed,you twinkle back at the bird.
But otherwise there is nothing visible of the havocand the prey and plunder. It is certain that much of the visiblelife passes violently into other forms, flashes without pause intoanother flame; but not all. Amid all the killing there must be muchdying. There are, for instance, few birds of prey left in our moreaccessible counties now, and many thousands of birds must dieuncaught by a hawk and unpierced. But if their killing is done somodestly, so then is their dying also. Short lives have all thesewild things, but there are innumerable flocks of them always alive;they must die, then, in innumerable flocks. And yet they keep themillions of the dead out of sight.
Now and then, indeed, they may be betrayed. Ithappened in a cold winter. The late frosts were so sudden, and thefamine was so complete, that the birds were taken unawares. The skyand the earth conspired that February to make known all thesecrets; everything was published. Death was manifest. Editors,when a great man dies, are not more resolute than was the frost of’95.
The birds were obliged to die in public. They weresurprised and forced to do thus. They became like Shelley in themonument which the art and imagination of England combined to raiseto his memory at Oxford.
Frost was surely at work in both cases, and in bothit wrought wrong. There is a similarity of unreason in betrayingthe death of a bird and in exhibiting the death of Shelley. Thedeath of a soldier— passe encore . But the death ofShelley was not his goal. And the death of the birds is so littlecharacteristic of them that, as has just been said, no one in theworld is aware of their dying, except only in the case of birds incages, who, again, are compelled to die with observation. Thewoodland is guarded and kept by a rule. There is no display of thebattlefield in the fields. There is no tale of the game-bag, noboast. The hunting goes on, but with strange decorum. You may passa fine season under the trees, and see nothing dead except here andthere where a boy has been by, or a man with a trap, or a man witha gun. There is nothing like a butcher’s shop in the w